Willing Custodian
M · E · D · L · F · C
A community can carry duties no member simply invented, persons can genuinely choose, and the world those duties concern is physical.
This is not a measure of personality, mental health, intelligence, or character.
Reality, on this profile, is a physical order, and observation is what should be able to correct a claim about it. Reasoning organizes what inquiry delivers. It is not pictured as a separate route around the world.
Some acts stay wrong even when their results are better, and the agent is treated as able to have refused them. The constraint has force, on this picture, because the person could have honored it.
Meaning is something a life answers to, and a community is a place where that answer can be recognized and kept. Belonging is part of finding what is worth living for.
The axes in this code
- Reality — Physicalism
- Knowledge — Empiricism
- Morality — Deontology
- Freedom — Libertarian free will
- Meaning — Discovery
- Social life — Communal priority
What this stance can see
- You keep explanations answerable to a world that can resist them.
- You let observation revise a theory that was pleasant to believe.
- You notice when a welcome result would be bought by a wrongful act.
- You protect the thought that a person can be the source of a turn not already written.
- You can care about a value you did not happen to prefer.
- You see that a life is formed with others and can owe them something.
What this stance can miss
- You may decide too quickly that a physical description has already said what experience is.
- You may wait for more data when the trouble is already in the question being asked.
- You may hold a rule so firmly that the harm of keeping it leaves the picture.
- You may ignore how much of a choice arrives already shaped.
- You may treat your reading of what was “already there” as if it were not also an interpretation.
- You may let “the community” speak without asking who is unheard inside it.
A pressure in the pairing
A pressure in this pairing: duty and an open alternative reinforce each other, and they can hide the luck already inside the ability to comply. A free refusal is not yet a full account of fairness.
Questions this combination has to face
The explanatory gap
A physicalist picture has to say what a completed physics would have done with the fact that seeing, hurting, and understanding are like something. Some physicalists treat the difficulty as a limit on our concepts. The difficulty is not yet a formal contradiction.
Luck inside an open will
If more than one act was open, the ability to take the better one may still be a matter of luck in character, upbringing, or timing. Galen Strawson pressed a related regress: a free act seems to require a self that is already responsible for the way it chooses. The regress is a problem for this pole, not a refutation delivered by the questionnaire.
Who speaks as the community
A priority for common life has to say who may speak for the whole, and what a member may refuse. Without that question, “the community” is only the loudest voice.
Questions for reflection
- What would count as a reason to say that some part of experience is not captured by a physical description?
- Where has a careful observation forced you to drop an explanation you wanted to keep?
- When you say someone should have refused, is that because a better result was available, or because the act was forbidden even if the result had been worse?
- If a community claims to have found what is worth living for, how can a member tell a discovery from pressure?
Traditions in the neighborhood
Reading, not a syllabus ranking
- The Analects, a later compilation of Confucian teaching
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
- Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)
- David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)
- Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785)
- Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974)
Editorial family: Physicalism, discovered meaning, and the priority of the community.